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From the Graduate Student Council

Greetings from the Graduate Student Council! We’re looking forward to the 2016 conference in Orlando, and we wanted to let you know of a few things we’re planning.

First, on Sunday evening, we’re hosting an event called "Thriving while striving: A graduate students’ forum on life in academia." As we normally do in this event, we’re not going to sit you down and make you listen to a panel of experts, because graduate students are the experts on this topic. Instead, we’ll host facilitated small-group discussion on topics of interest, such as funding, work-life balance, networking, and leadership service. You’ll swap strategies for dealing with difficult faculty or for balancing teaching and research, and if you’re interested, you’ll learn how you can get involved in planning next year’s events.

The other GSC-sponsored event is a panel discussion on Monday afternoon called "The (job) interview: Before, during and after." Our panel represents a diverse selection of career paths -- there are two professors, a researcher from a nonprofit institute, and a publisher -- and they’ll each share their insights into the process of applying for jobs in applied linguistics. Of course, everyone’s job search is a bit different, so we’ll be sure to leave plenty of time for attendees to ask questions.

The final moment we want to highlight is the AAAL Business Meeting, when the 2016-17 Steering Committee takes over leadership of the GSC. We outgoing co-chairs, Nicole Pettitt and Daniel Ginsberg, are grateful to have had the opportunity to work with and for so many of you in the past few years, and we’re thrilled to turn over GSC leadership to incoming co-chairs Mengying Liu and Lindsey Kurtz. Great things are ahead for graduate students in AAAL -- watch this space in the coming months to learn how you can take part in it.